As an avowed atheist living among a sea of believers (both locally and on the Internet), I have spent a lot of time discussing my beliefs (or lack thereof, as the case may be). The purpose of this blog is not to prove the non-existence of God or "de-convert" anybody from their faith, but simply to preserve some of these discussions and allow me to flesh them out through the process of writing them down, as well as to share them with anybody who might be interested in reading them.

Thursday, December 7, 2017

False Equivalency and the Burden of Proof

Time and again theists argue that, since atheists claim that God doesn’t exist, it is actually the atheists who have the “burden of proof” to show that God does not exist as they claim.
When this happens, most atheists respond by saying that atheists in
general “merely” lack a belief in God (or gods) and that they don’t
actually make any claims that need to be proven. Theists, they say, are
the ones who go around claiming that God does exist, and atheists
simply say, “I don’t believe you” or perhaps even, “You have not
provided me with any good reason, any compelling evidence or argument,
to accept that your claim is true.”

Now, this
is certainly true as far as it goes, but it often comes across as just a
way to avoid the burden of proof by putting it back onto the theists
without actually contributing anything to the discussion aside from
saying, “I don’t have to prove anything, you do!” And some atheist take this a step further by actually acknowledging that atheists would
indeed bear the full burden of proof of establishing that God does not
exist if, in fact, they actually asserted that He didn’t exist instead
of just stating their lack of belief.

Well, this is all well and good for atheist who really do
just lack a belief in God, but it makes those of us who actually assert
that no gods actually exist seem a bit irrational (which is, of course,
exactly what the theists have in mind when making their claim about the
burden of proof in the first place). Are we irrational to assert that
no gods exist? Perhaps, but there are two important things to understand
here:

“Absolute proof” only exists in the realm of pure
mathematics in the first place, and the best anybody can ever actually
be expected to provide is compelling evidence of whatever it is
they happen to be asserting as true. Many theists actually seem to
acknowledge this fact by claiming that the existence of God can neither
be proved nor disproved (as a way of avoiding their own burden of proof)
right before attempting to shift that supposedly impossible burden of
proof onto atheists. Yes, they want to have it both ways: “God’s
existence can be neither proved nor disproved, but it if it could be
then it would be the atheist’s responsibility.”

While the
“burden of proof” is on the person making a claim about something, not
all burdens are equally onerous! In other words, there is a false
equivalency in asserting that the burden of proof of somebody claiming
there is no God is exactly the same burden of proof of somebody claiming
there is a God.

Let me address these two points individually.

1. Can the Existence of God Be Proved or Disproved?

Is
it actually the case that the existence of God can neither be proved
nor disproved? Well, again, if you are talking about “proof” as in the
the absolute certainty only available in the realm of pure mathematics,
then of course it is true. But that’s not really what most people mean
when they talk about proving something. If asked to prove whether I have
an apple in my hand, I can do so for all practical purposes by opening
my hand and showing the apple that I’m holding. Nobody claims that the
apple could just be an illusion, that perhaps our whole existence is
merely a dream or a simulation. When somebody asks me to “prove” that I
have an apple in my hand, they are merely asking for compelling evidence that I have an apple in my hand, and I can provide that compelling evidence simply by showing the apple.

Similarly, if asked to prove that I don’t
have an apple in my hand, once again I can provide compelling evidence
simply by opening my hand and showing that it is empty. This is what
most people mean and expect when discussing proof in everyday life, and
requiring something beyond compelling evidence when discussing
the existence of God is nothing more than a dodge on the part of those
people who know full well that they cannot provide any compelling
evidence for their assertion. So the real question is not whether the
existence or nonexistence of God can be “proved” but instead whether any
compelling evidence can be provided as to its existence or not.

2. Is the Burden of Proof the Same between Theists and Atheists?

So, just how heavy is the burden of proof when it comes to providing compelling evidence for the non-existence of God and is it really the same as the burden of proof when it comes to providing compelling evidence for the existence
of God? The answer to this can be summed up in a phrase made popular by
the astronomer Carl Sagan, to wit: “Extraordinary claims require
extraordinary evidence." When somebody makes an extraordinary claim
(such as, say, that there exists an omnipotent, omniscient, and
all-loving intelligent being who created the universe, appeared before
various people, provided moral guidelines, performed all sorts miracles,
made lots of promises about future events, etc.), the burden of proof
becomes extraordinarily high.

It’s not enough, for example, to simply provide an argument that suggests that something
must be responsible for the formation of the universe or to claim that,
since “science” can’t currently explain some aspect of the natural
world that therefore the particular God somebody happens to worship
“must be” (or even “possibly could be”) the actual explanation. It’s not
enough to point to anecdotal stories of people who occasionally
received something they prayed for (especially when ignoring all the
times they didn’t get what they prayed for). It’s not enough to
point out cases where holy scriptures written by ignorant and
superstitious Bronze Age desert tribesmen supposedly mention something
that, if interpreted in just the right way, kind of, sort of
reflect knowledge that people living at that time may not have been able
to discover on their own (especially when ignoring all the rest of the
text that completely disagrees with what we now know about the
universe). Theists who claim that God exists have a very, very large
burden of proof to provide compelling evidence that the God that they
actually worship (as opposed to some sort of “hidden” God who created
the universe and is now wholly imperceptible by any means) does, in
fact, exist.

And what of the burden of proof
for those of us who claim that no such God exists? Given the
extraordinary high burden of proof theists bear in the first place, all
we need do is point out that the sort of God actually worshiped by
theists would necessarily leave behind plenty of compelling evidence of
its existence, which makes the lack of any such compelling evidence is,
in itself, compelling evidence that such a God does not exist (see Absence of Evidence IS Evidence of Absence).
If further compelling evidence is required, we need only point out the
logical contradictions inherent with the theistic concept of God in the
first place (see The Logical Impossibility of God).

Now, keep in mind that atheism does not exist in a vacuum, but is instead a response
to a claim made by theists. Atheists didn’t just come up with the idea
one day that “no gods exist” and then start running around telling
everybody this. Instead, it was theists who made the original claim that
gods do exist and then tried to covert everybody else to their belief.
Which is to say that, even if an atheist does bear some burden of
proof for claiming that no gods exist, that in no way removes the much
larger burden of proof that theists bear. For more on this, see Atheism Without Theism?.

Another
thing to keep in mind when weighing the relative burden of proof is
that there’s a difference between denying something for which there is compelling evidence and denying something for which there is no compelling evidence.
If somebody claimed, for example, that the moon was an illusion and
didn’t really exist, then that person would bear a pretty hefty burden
of proof to back up that claim since there is plenty of well-accepted
evidence that the moon does, in fact, exist (we can see it, we have
measured how it affects the tides, we have actually landed on it, etc.).
Compare that with somebody who responds to a claim that a 10-mile wide
cloaked alien spacecraft is currently hovering over downtown Manhattan,
poised to obliterate the Empire State Building, by claiming that no such
craft exists because there is absolutely no evidence of it even
possibly existing (let alone actually existing). Sure, the person
denying the existence of the moon and the person denying the existence
of the cloaked spacecraft are both making a claim, but the burden of
proof is not equal between these two claims. Similarly, atheists are not
in the position of denying something for which there is compelling
evidence, but instead in the position of denying something for which
there is no compelling evidence, and as a result their burden of proof
is much less than theists would have us believe.

Some
theists, by the way, attempt to wiggle out of their burden of proof by
saying that they merely “believe” in God without actually “claiming” or
“asserting” that God exists (much the same, supposedly, as how many
atheist claim that “lack of belief in God” is not the same as “asserting
that God doesn’t exist”). Sure, there are undoubtedly some theists who don’t actually claim that God exists just as there are some atheists who actually do claim that God does not
exist, but the typical dynamic is for theists to claim that God does,
in fact, exist (and they have evidence and arguments to prove it), since
most theists apparently understand how irrational it would be to
believe in something you don’t actually claim exists in the first place.
Seriously, how ridiculous would it be to go around saying stuff like,
“I believe that grass is green and rain is wet, but I’m not actually
claiming that grass is green and rain is wet”?

The
point of all this is that many atheists have allowed themselves to be
convinced that the “burden of proof” is a bad thing that should on no
account ever be accepted when it comes to the existence of God, and this
just allows theists to claim that, while it may not be possible to
prove that God does exist, it’s just as impossible to prove that God doesn’t exist
and therefore atheists are as equally irrational as theists for
believing in something that cannot be proved. Once we realize, however,
that “proved” in this context just means “has compelling evidence to
support” and that the burden of proof on theists is significantly higher
than that on atheists, we should stop being afraid of the burden of
proof and feel confident asserting without reservation that no God of
any sort worshiped by anybody actually exists.

Oh, and with regard to the so-called “Deist” God who created the universe and then promptly disappeared without a trace: